


That Colossal Wreck

by Masu_Trout



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Blackwatch Reaper | Gabriel Reyes, Body Horror, Fall of Overwatch, Gen, Medical Experimentation, Pre-Canon, Putting the 'Mad' in 'Mad Scientist'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 07:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14255598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Gabriel came stumbling through her door early one morning, formless and screaming with shadows rising like smoke from his misshapen body.Overwatch has fallen, Moira's on the run, and, worst of all, her experiments keep going completely wrong.





	That Colossal Wreck

**Author's Note:**

> Retribution has me so excited, I _had_ to write something for these two.

Gabriel came stumbling through her door early one morning, formless and screaming with shadows rising like smoke from his misshapen body.

Moira’s first reaction was to drop the culture she’d been studying and aim a bolt of energy at the monstrosity. Her second reaction—once she recognized the shape within the shifting mass, the hint of a familiar voice under the growling cries of pain—was disappointment.

Not quite right, then. Shame. She’d have to go back to the drawing board on that particular experiment.

“Gabe,” she said. “I see you’ve managed to fuck it all up. Congratulations.” Moira lowered her hands, but kept a burst of energy sizzling in one palm. No telling what he might try in this state.

Something about her voice seemed to focus him. He froze a moment on the tile of her laboratory floor, his deep raspy breathing the only sound in the room, and then he tilted his not-quite-a-head up to stare at her.

His eyes opened, a patch of color amidst the endless wisping grey. Then another pair opened, and another and another and—hm. She’d never realized complete organ generation would be a possibility with this experiment. Part of her wanted to try and scoop one out, see whether the internal structures were fully developed, but that probably wouldn’t end well. Gabe was already glaring at her with all the rage a shifting mass of darkness and eyes could muster. Best not test her luck just yet.

“ _Moira_ ,” he snarled from some imperceptible mouth, “ _what did you do?_ ”

“Saved your life, clearly.” She pointed towards the TV in the corner, which had been running nonstop breaking updates for the past thirty-six hours. “Or did you think you would’ve made it out of there on your own?”

The first report had kept it simple: _Explosion at Overwatch Base_ , the card read, overlaid with aerial shots of a smoking pile of rubble bearing the familiar logo. She'd wanted to think things might not be as bad as they seemed—perhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps there was some other reason no one within Blackwatch was getting her messages all of a sudden—but each successive update featured more and more detail and left her with less and less hope until finally she'd had to mute the TV entirely just to keep her blood pressure under control.

Of course they'd fought. Of course they'd destroyed everything. Overwatch's poster boys couldn't just let the organization crumble under its own massive weight the way corporations _normally_ did, could they? No, they had to go out with a bang; tear the bandage off and fuck the consequences. Never mind the ones who'd be left bleeding out thanks to this little stunt.

He shuddered violently. Tremors ran like ripples across the swirling miasma of his form. “ _This isn’t…_ ”

She could already guess what he was about to say: _this isn’t what I wanted_. As if he hadn’t agreed to every little detail of the improvements she made to him, as if he hadn’t found her specifically because she had the mind and the stomach to go so much further than merely what a person _wanted_. As if he hadn’t been thrilled about her successes, right up until the moment he’d realized they came at a price.

No point in saying any of that. She’d agreed to join with Blackwatch for the funding, not because she saw Gabe as some sort of kindred spirit in scientific understanding. Her source of money was collapsing now, and she’d have to get out before it all came down on her head. So it went.

Shame, though. She'd liked it here. Liked the people she was working with, even, and for her that was rare.

“Well,” she said, “you’re getting better, at least. Are those hands?”

His body was slowly sliding into something more humanoid. She could see the rough approximations of legs and arms, a rounded shape that might eventually become a head, and a smoothing that suggested he was beginning to remember what a torso looked like.

Maybe being around someone human-shaped was helping him. She wondered whether he might be able to bring himself back together entirely, given enough time. Would he look like the same old Gabe again, or would he take another face entirely? Or perhaps he might not gain a face back at all—the fine sculpted lines there were difficult to recreate, full of blood vessels and delicate skin, and Blackwatch’s (former, now) leader was neither a plastic surgeon nor a master artist.

Interesting questions. Questions, unfortunately, that she wouldn’t likely have the chance to find answers to any time soon.

“Come in,” she told Gabe, stepping back to allow him to shamble further into the depths of her lab. “I’ve got three days left here, by my estimate. Ought to be enough time to get you back on your feet.” Assuming he remembered how to have feet, of course.

“ _Three… what?_ ” He snapped his head—and she felt comfortable calling it a head now, so that was improvement—around to stare at her once more with those many sets of eyes. “ _Where?_ ”

Moira shrugged. “Who knows? Not here, though. That’s the important part.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Moira laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Look around you, great leader! Overwatch is being crucified on the shrine of public opinion. Jack is dead—excellent planning, by the way—and none of your _friends_ are going to be happy to see you after how he died.”

The tides were turning. He could flee or he could try to push them back, and Moira knew which option was less likely to get them both put on trial and locked away for life.

She only wished she knew whether he'd be able to accept that. Emotions were as volatile as any deadly substance she'd ever worked with, and Gabe—for all he tried to project the image of perfect stoicism—was every bit their prisoner. He'd always tried to project the image of a perfect military mind, even while he ran wild off-the-books missions to avenge injured coworkers and risked his own standing in Overwatch to protect his personal friends.

He was a foolish man. Endearingly foolish, occasionally, but always foolish. A blow like this might break him yet.

He was silent a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before and harsher than sandpaper against an open wound. “Jesse? Genji?”

She shrugged. “Gone, if they’re smart. Same as you.”

After that, Gabe didn’t say anything more. He just curled up tight on the floor of the lab, more a localized chemical leak than anything even close to alive. He might’ve cried, but Moira didn’t think so; she was pretty sure he hadn’t figured out tear ducts yet.

Watching the slowly-roiling mass grew boring surprisingly quickly, scientific breakthrough or no scientific breakthrough. Moira sighed and left him to it. 

Fine, then. Let him stew it over. Moira had never been any good at giving comfort, but she knew how to make the tough decisions. An extra car, a fake ID without a photo, enough cash to bribe a moderately greedy government official, a list of cargo planes leaving the country within the next week. No telling which one he'd end up needing; all of that depended on whether he could put himself back together again. They were, however, the least she could do.

It wasn’t that she didn’t care for Gabe. She just didn’t care to watch him mope. There was work to be done, same as there always had been. Sleep, sorrow, nerves—those could come later. 

She had no use for any of them now.


End file.
